Gone are the days of manual ledgers, paper trails and shredders as we now look to “blockchain”, “cryptocurrencies” and “cloud accounting” systems. Big Data and the analysis of such are becoming hot topics, and as we move to a world where access to and interpretation of data is becoming fluid, one question that is often asked is, how do we know this data is a true reflection of what is happening in a business, in our business? How do we obtain comfort that the data going into our business systems is real, accurate and not being tampered with along the way?

Here at CIB, our assurance team have been grappling with these questions for some time. Although effective, traditional audit testing can only go so far in providing comfort over specific risks such as fraud. There is only so much manual testing and analysis one can perform efficiently. We are living in 2019 for heaven’s sake, there must be something out there that can help us to help our clients to reduce these risks? If we don’t have flying cars and housekeeping robots by now (as the producers Hanna-Barbera prophesied in The Jetsons), surely the techies out there can develop something that can quickly analyse and interpret Big Data, finding anomalies and flagging unusual transactions?

MindBridge

Cue MindBridge. After much research and testing, we have now found a potential solution in reducing the risks posed by unsafe, unwanted and dangerous data through the assistance of cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) software. Introducing MindBridge.

At its simplest, MindBridge takes a data set (e.g. general ledger of transactions, accounts payable sub-ledger of transactions) and analyses the data using a combination of rules and AI to identify transactions that are “High Risk”. This could include transactions that have strange number combinations, are posted into the system at unusual times, contain strange phrases, are unusual in sequence and in nature. What makes this technology unique is that it uses AI to learn trends in the data set, not only comparing trends over time but also trends in other data sets to highlight risk. In a matter of minutes, data sets with millions of lines can be analysed to pinpoint anomalies, which in turn assists the auditors and senior management to identify problems.

We are the first accounting firm in Australia to use this tool and cannot wait to roll this out to you, our clients as well as other accounting firms and the industry abroad. We see this technology revolutionising the accounting and risk industry and, although in its relative infancy, we are confident MindBridge will assist you in your business to mitigate risk.